Sentient Services in Texas and the Kalypso Agency in Connecticut are both market research firms that have joined SL with an eye toward keeping track of how residents feel about the various RL companies with an SL presence. From the referring article: 'As the web changes from 2D to 3D we are expecting that there will be continued interest in marketing research in virtual worlds as this presents a new frontier for consumer engagement,' said marketing director for Kalypso Nicholas Cameron.

Has anyone in our audience had any contact with these companies? It's tough to do any kind of resident-involved research without going directly to the residents one-by-one; the biggest problem is making residents aware that one's company even exists in the first place. What's the best way to do this? Buy billboard space in a popular sim? Have a grand opening event? Advertising space in the many SL-related magazines?

(Via mrweb.com)

Some few physical world businesses are having a hard time in Second Life. They're getting cold feet, or pulling out, or just plain baffled. Though there are more arriving each day than leaving, hard lessons have been learned.

Chief among these is that the customers and would-be customers have learned that many of these businesses just don't give a damn about them. That's a widespread viral message that's very hard to shift out of the market.

Marketers, take note. We all know you're keenly interested in your various target demographics. We're not disputing that. We don't mind. We're really used to being marketed at, both in the physical world and in Second Life and ... well, okay, everywhere.

You like to know where your target demographic is. You like to reach them. You like to look at a space and know who the demographics occupying that space are.

Here's a little tip for you, honey ...

The Internet is generally said to have been born in 1969, with ARPAnet. Or in 1977 when Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf introduced TCP (the transmission control protocol). Take your pick. Either way, the Internet (everyone just called it 'the net' back then)was in increasing use among software developers, research institutions and well-heeled hobbyists for quite some years before Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web in 1990/91. Better grab some coffee, this is going to take us a few minutes.

The World Wide Web was very much an ad-hoc and semi-anarchic collaborative medium back in those days. Some people used the CERN developed source code for the earliest web-servers. Others hammered out their own code. People began to work on HTML parsers and presentation managers/browsers. The Web at the time outside the core group of researchers and technical hobbyists was sparse, and stylistic variations led to assorted incompatibilities, and what one might charitably call 'uneven experience'.

The World Wide Web was a hit, however, and pulled people online not only for it, but for existing parallel technologies, like IRC, and the popular virtual worlds of the period. And that's approximately where the outcry began, in approximately 1994. One lesser Internet demagogue of the period summed it up like this: "It's like having a million people barge into your lounge-room, pushing and shoving each-other, knocking over the ashtrays and all shouting at once, and...most of all, complaining about your decor and furniture."

"The retail brand today transcends the channel. When [customers] have a poor Web experience, as in poor page loads [or] unsuccessful transactions," it's taken out on the storefronts, too. "Consumers don't understand the complexity of delivering an optimal Web experience," she said. -- Consumers Punishing Physical Stores for Sins of Online Counterparts (PC Magazine Tech News, via Yahoo).

Intuitively, it would be silly to suggest that this wasn't also the case for RL businesses trying to extend themselves into an SL-oriented promotional channel. If ExampleCorp Inc moves in and places a laggy, spammy tower advertisement next to your virtual lot, you just might be disinclined to do business with them. The same, if you feel they've presented their brand through any channel in a half-hearted, shoddy, insulting, condescending or egregiously inconvenient way, whether that's in the real world, on the World Wide Web, in Second Life, or on the phone in the middle of dinner.

Many companies don't have the knowledge or the focus to get things right on the web. You've seen them, I'm sure, and rolled your eyes. You've probably thought twice about walking into their physical stores, or calling them after seeing the mess they made of their website. The same holds true of Second Life. If you're going to market, sell or promote to Second Life residents, you need to hook up with the expertise to do it properly.

If you don't get it right, the residents aren't going to forget it. That's something you can bank on.

It is a coincidence that Akela should have posted what he did about the differences between real-life marketing products and SL products, as I have just had a lively exchange of email with a friend who is a RL advertising agency businessman in the UK, who assumed he must have a client with a youth product to be interested in SL. I supplied him with a link to this page, which is a couple of years old, but shows that the demographic for online gaming in general is not what it is assumed to be. Just because the high profile campaigns in SL have been youth brands and aimed at a youth market, doesn't mean that's what we have in SL.

My experience of having many friends and acquaintances in SL is that the minority of them are under 30. Maybe that's because I like long intellectual conversations, or because I have a horror of text-speak -- except for my well-known addiction to lol -- and like people who speak in whole sentences and use punctuation. However, I work as a mentor and the incoming avatars must be a fairly random bunch, and I have met a substantial proportion of my friends that way. They aren't all 19. By a long chalk.

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